Planeswalker Abigale

My husband introduced me to the popular card game "Magic the Gathering" shortly after we got married.  I grew up playing Yu-Gi-Oh, another card game, so it didn't take me long to get fairly good at Magic.  I'm far from professional, but I have a lot of fun with it, and I love the Dungeon and Dragons feel to the card artwork: beautiful images depicting amazing creatures.  It didn't take long before I wanted to make some Magic cards of my own.  I found an awesome and free program online called "Magic Set Editor."  Click here to learn more about it.  NOTE: even though I haven't had any trouble with downloading this program, there is always a risk when you download content off the Internet.  Do so with caution!

I like animals more than I like people, so I wanted to create a set based off of nature and its creatures.  I'm calling my homemade set "Nature's Revolt."  All of Magic's sets have a back story of some kind, so the story behind Nature's Revolt is basically this:

"The major races of Innistrad have battled each other for centuries.  Humans, vampires, zombies, and wandering spirits...  The forces of Nature have always kept to themselves, patiently waiting out the blood and fires of war that wage all around them.  However, Nature's patience has finally run out.  The creatures of the wilderness are now a part of the war with the intention of destroying anything that gets in their way.  Nature has revolted."

 

"Overrun" by Carl Critchlow - MTG Core Set 2012

The first step to creating a homemade set of cards was to figure out how many cards I should include and how to divide all the different types.  I actually had to use (le gasp!) math to figure it out.  Here's a small glimpse into what I mean:

On average, from each color group, 50% are common, 25% are uncommon, 20% are rare, and 8% are mythic.  If I have 15 cards per color group, 9 should be creatures and 6 should be spells, divided by their rarity, etc.

It was definitely a stretch to work with numbers and fractions, but I'm proud to say I did it, and my set is neatly balanced because of it.  Another factor I had to keep in mind was to keep the power of my cards balanced.  Rares are going to be more powerful by default, but there's no point in creating my own cards if they are all ridiculously powerful and unsuitable to ever be used in a real deck.  Like this card by rockvillepictures on Deviantart:

 

After many hours scouring Deviantart and many more hours creating and editing original creatures and their abilities, I finished "Nature's Revolt" with exactly 100 cards in the set.  And here they are!  I put them in Google documents according to their color.  Enjoy!  And please, if you have any thoughts or ideas on how to make these cards better, please let me know!

 White   #1-15

 Blue   #16-30

 Black   #31-45

 Red  #46-60

Green  #61-75 

 Mixed Creatures, Artifacts, Land, and Tokens  #76-100

Some random thoughts about my project:

1. Deviantart.com is the best place to find awesome, super-talented, ultra realistic pictures of just about anything!  I included the artist's name on the bottom of each card so you can check out the original picture as well as more of their artwork.
2. The official Magic the Gathering website was a great resource to get ideas on different card functions and proper ability descriptions.  Each set includes a complete card list and other great info.  If you want to know more about Magic the Gathering, you definitely need to check it out!
3. I made two brand new abilities that are completely my own!  Look for Rabid and Scorch.
4. My favorite creatures to find and create were frogs and spirits.
5. Finding good images for black cards was SCARY!  I had to search through a lot of skulls, demons, and other creepy things to get what I wanted.  But it was worth it!
6. I printed all of these cards off on photo paper and put into a collector's album along with the other real Magic the Gathering sets.  This project was a lot of fun, but a lot of work!  Nature's Revolt will probably be my only homemade set I make.  :)
7. There are some split cards in this set.  The front and back are right next to each other, but you might not notice they belong together until you read "transform" in the descriptions.  Be on the lookout!
8.  I tried to make my cards as similar to the real cards as I could, but there is one spoof card that I couldn't help but make.  See if you can spot it.  ;)